As the demand for social services and the requirements for refined social governance continue to rise, the intensity of emotional labor among social workers has intensified, and the problems of psychological detachment and work alienation have become increasingly prominent. Effective emotional regulation is an important basis for social workers to maintain work engagement and improve professional effectiveness. Based on the conservation of resources theory and the self-determination theory, this study uses depersonalization and emotional exhaustion as mediating variables to construct a chain-mediation model of the influence of emotional labor on work alienation. An empirical analysis based on 912 valid questionnaires shows that emotional labor has a positive impact on work alienation; depersonalization and emotional exhaustion each play a partial mediating role between emotional labor and work alienation, and form a chain-conduction mechanism of “emotional labor→depersonalization→emotional exhaustion→work alienation”. This study reveals the psychological mechanism by which emotional labor affects the behavioral attitudes of social workers from the perspective of resource loss, and provides empirical evidence and important references for social service agencies to optimize management strategies and alleviate employees’ psychological exhaustion and work alienation.